The Kingsolver Bounce

Apparently Barbara Kingsolver has quite a bit of crossover with the Montessori audience.

Seriously. After I posted the Kingsolver piece on Saturday, I got 1944 hits on the blog, the most ever. Most days I get about 100. The Facebook page got 800 views and shot to 950 “likes” from under 900. (None of this actually much by real social media standards, but still—Montessori represent!) So thanks, sagebrush, setsuko, grace, indiwind3, emanate80, balletgirl1980, and all the rest. I hope I can continue to meet your expectations.

All that is very gratifying, of course. But that’s not actually why I do the blog. (Well, not entirely. Vanity* is a Fundamental Human Need, after all.) The point is essentially to make connections—within Montessori, to be sure, but from Montessori to the rest of the world. Let’s get our story out there. And now we have a master storyteller in our camp.

Of all the people who clicked and liked and followed and shared in the last few days, surely someone has a connection to Ms. Kingsolver. I would love for her to see the post, and hear how deeply her brief remarks resonated with so many people in our work.

I’ll send her agent a letter myself. There’s no email on her website, and apparently she gets flooded with correspondence and rather values her privacy. I don’t want to impose on her. But if someone out there wanted to pass the link along, she could do with it as she sees fit. We would at least like to express our thanks for her recognition of the essence of our work, and the casual yet pithy mention.

* Not vanitas, as this post originally read. My keen-eyed wife pointed out that the Fundamental Human Needs Chart should read “vanity,” but some versions say “vanitas”, which is a genre of Dutch painting from the 16th and 17th centuries. TMO regrets the error.